


all the truth i could tell

by quixxotique (crownlessliestheking)



Series: i hope you find your peace [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: A little biographical, Alpha Timeline, Angst, Canon Compliant, I mean obviously they die, It's implied major character death, One line implies Alpha Bro/Alpha Mom but you can take that as you wish, Some Fluff, introspective, mentions of stiller and wilson and glover, ok so we don't really see him die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-11-30 09:05:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11460417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownlessliestheking/pseuds/quixxotique
Summary: Quiet, like you could deny even saying it, you tell him that you’re proud. You say the name you picked for him, all those years ago, when Rose first mentioned the entire kid thing. The name that had felt just about right with the thought of him, shitty cliché as it may be.





	all the truth i could tell

**Author's Note:**

> The second installment is Alpha!Bro centric, because this guy is pretty great and I did want to explore him some. Inspiration taken from an RP for some of the backstory for him, and from my own headcanons. Hope you enjoy?

You are Dave Strider, and your world has gone to shit.

Well, you’re somewhat certain that it went to shit a couple of decades ago, if Lalonde and her witchy bitchy bullshit are to be believed (and experience has shown you that it fucking is, which is beyond unfair in your beyond qualified opinion). But sometimes you think about the improbable series of events that led to the fuckening of your world, and are honestly entirely baffled. It’s not enough that a goddamn Sea Hitler has to literally land on your planet, but she apparently marries some old comedian because- what, she’s got a soft spot for them? Bullshit, you call so much bullshit; the Batterwitch doesn’t have any sort of a heart. But again with the comedian: who the shitting fuck would look at that rancid harpy with approximately fifty square miles of hair, three-foot-tall horns, fangs, fins, and grey skin, and a body that’d make Kim K want to shit herself, and thinks, ah, yes, I’m definitely going to tap that?

You give the guy the benefit of the doubt and assume brainwashing, honestly. That’s the only explanation that makes sense, and ensures that you _don’t_ have to kinkshame Colonel Sassacre and his huge fucking joke book from beyond the grave (no, that’s not a euphemism, you don’t want to know what kind of dick he had or if the book was really overcompensation).

You’re pretty sure it started there, skipped around to Old Lady English and her tech and some kind of animal cruelty? She died when you were young, you know this much, but that didn’t really stop her from being the first goddamn bastion of Resistance, and you wish you could have met her. The lady was a genius, you can say that much, and when you’re maudlin, you like to think that she would have liked you. Even if she might have been frighteningly astute at seeing through all your bullshit, at least she would have been nicer about it than Lalonde. Probably.

But as much as you like to shoot jibes and digs her way, Rose is. Pretty solid. Ha, yeah. The woman scares the shit out of you sometimes, but you know that there’s nobody else you’d rather have at your back.

(Never mind the fact that some days, six drinks in and questionable substances ingested and snorted, respectively, you feel like there’s something missing, two people that should be here but aren’t)

God, you still remember the first time you met in person; so much younger, so much different. It feels like a lifetime ago, if you wanted to be dramatic about it (cue opacity 69% of a timelapse of a sunset over the Pacific or some shit, and you gazing mournfully into the distance through your shades).  You were still a gangly kid, barely started on the first SBaHJ script and far before anyone from Hollywood had even heard of the name Dave Strider, and she was halfway through the first Complacency of the Learned, except it was pretty much gay wizard fanfiction, then (now, it’s symbolically gay, and not fanfiction).

You can picture it now: You, slouching indolent in a booth in an old, beat up diner halfway to fucking nowhere in upstate New York, five minutes early because you raised yourself right; Rose, walking in, hair chopped short to her jaw and lipstick too dark for her face, soft and a little round until you looked at her face and her sharp, close-lipped smile and sharper eyes got straight to dissecting you for god knows what. You’d seen her skim her eyes over you (hungry) and then seemingly dismiss you- and, well, you’ve never been good at taking a hint like that, at being overlooked, underestimated like the gutter-rat you grew up as. You’d raised your eyebrows and purposely slouched lower, and she’d sat down and started talking and her voice was quiet and yours wasn’t its usual crafted monotone, not yet and not for her, but your resemblance was already uncanny, yours and this girl from half a country away, and if you wanted to be dramatic again, you’d say you felt that kinship in your bones like something slotting into place, like the shift-click- _yes_ when you make your turntables fucking sing the melody you want. And you talked, for hours, and hours, until the diner closed, and then you talked some more; her parents had died, she had this huge house in the middle of fuck-nowhere but not once did you think holy shit this lady’s gonna murder me even when you gave her a ride home (she took the bus, who even does that?) and even when she poured you a glass of wine way too classy for your tattered shirt and old jeans and asked you if you preferred cyanide or arsenic with it.

Good times.

Well, not really, you were dirt poor and barely able to feed yourself. And, according to Rose, you probably should have had a fucking meteor baby land somewhere in your vicinity the day you turned twenty. Which is- ridiculous. You didn’t need another mouth to feed, then, and you can’t imagine yourself taking care of a kid.

(You wake up choking on screams, sometimes, at a dream where you see a man impaled through the chest with a sword, his shades dark and pointed, his white shirt soaked through with blood. You know, somehow, that he’s your brother.)

Lalonde will never say it, but you know that she feels a little cheated, sometimes. It was months before both your twentieth birthdays that she’d told you, and sure, things seemed pretty fucking obscure; you’d still been sceptical of her weird clairvoyance shit back then, and of the time powers you were apparently supposed to have (never mind that you could feel your heartbeat and it wasn’t human, but like clockwork, that you always knew the time down the millisecond, that you could sometimes feel a weird sense of déjà vu when something bad would happen- daveja vu?).  But this, of all things, was something she’d been utterly convinced by. You’ll never admit that her excitement was contagious, because you know that you’d be a shit parent, and besides. You could barely feed yourself, back then, how were you supposed to manage a baby?

She’d prepared, though, bought some baby shit and then sent pictures like it was some passive-aggressive prompt to get you started on your own preparation. When the day came, and the kid didn’t, well. You’ve both been drunker since then.

(You’ll never admit to being disappointed, too.)

You both recovered pretty quickly, though, because what else was there to do? Keep moving forward, of course, like some kind of somewhat obscure Disney movie with a talking robot and a kid with spiky blonde hair and too-round glasses that ends up changing the world. So you wrote, and she wrote, and you both made it big separately, but hell if it wasn’t great to see each other there, at the top, scream down at the adoring masses ‘look how far we’ve come’.

It’s not like you got to enjoy that, though, because the next thing you know, Rose is telling you that Betty Crocker the cake company is evil and going to take over the world. Yeah. That one, you dismiss outright, and she gets pissed. Pissed enough not to talk to you for months- shit, nearly a year. And you let that be, even if it feels a whole lot like you’re suddenly alone, but Lalonde’s not your only friend, far from it. You’ve got Wilson and Stiller and life is _good_ , it’s work hard party harder, liquor and drugs and awards littering your walls and tables and an Oscar, then another, that you can use as a baseball bat, and you’re still practicing with that shitty sword of yours because you need some kind of exercise, even if you feel like an idiot at three in the morning when you nearly slice your own ear off.

(Sometimes, if it’s late enough, if you’ve had something to drink before, you can swear you see that man from your nightmares looming over you, face blank and sword pointed at your throat as you ache with bruises under the relentless sun).

You didn’t know why you kept fighting, back then, even though part of you hated it; you’d had enough of that when you were younger, enough of kids beating you up because you had weird eyes and were too skinny and had second-hand shit and were a foster kid, and when you learned how to fight back, they’d still come for you, but it’d last longer this time and there’d be blood on both sides.

But then Lalonde comes back, shows up at your swanky bachelorpad in gorgeous LA with a binder tucked under her arm, looking older with lines bracketing the corners of her mouth and her eyes sharper and harder and _tired_. And you let her and, and she talks. God, she talks for hours, but not before sweeping your place for bugs, and you’re in your fucking boxers and hungover out your ass and she’s pointing out why everything has been circling the goddamn toilet drain lately and all you can do is stare.

You barely believed in then, really, and you barely believe it now. What the fuck kind of alien overlord tries to take over a planet through a _baking company_? The actual worst part is how it kind of made sense, how critics of CrockerCorp would soon disappear, how all the reviews turned positive, and anyone reporting the deaths or health issues of anyone who regularly consumed their products would be taken care of. Lalonde’s words, not yours, but the bloodstains on some of the pages were enough to convince you.

And when you asked her, still in shock, still not _wanting_ to believe, what the fuck was this all supposed to have to do with you? She fucking tells you that well, she’s going to fight this, and you can either be with her or against her, and you know that the world isn’t all black and white like that but she gives a goddamn spiel _straight out of her book_ and talks about using your influence for good, and when she leaves, you start editing the script of your second movie.

It all snowballed from there, really. Turns out she’d gotten the information from someone who used to be part of Old Lady English’s company, SkaiaNet, the OG resistance, as it were. Also turns out that they’d died, days later, and gods, but she _knew._

(She also tells you about two children that are going to arrive 400 years too late, that _need_ the two of you to win if they have a chance, that some things get fucked up and are beyond anyone’s control).

There’s no time to breathe, after that, just movie after movie after movie, parties you go to so you can find out who’s like you and who isn’t, and it’s a goddamn shock to see that split in Hollywood, to see her nasty feelers invading a place you, stupid like you are, have come to think of as _yours_. You get in a fight with RDJ, and you swear that his smile is too rigid, movements too unnatural, and that when he punches you, it feels like you’ve just been hit in the face with a goddamn pipe.

(Your cheek bruises up nicely after that one, and you get better with your sword, start carrying it everywhere. In fact, you find two more, both purported to be unbreakable. Expensive as shit, but something tells you to get them, anyway. And you get better at fighting, even when the ring of metal is constantly in your ears).

CrockerCorp rebrands, and everything changes. You’re at fucking _war_ , now. Your movies get more and more outspoken, and some part of you was still hoping that Lalonde was wrong, that everyone else was wrong, but now you know that’s not true. Cameras and guns flash before your eyes, and your movies make it big, then bigger, and when Glover dies is when it really sinks in that you can lose, too.

But there’s no time for grief, no rest for the sickwicked, and you do what you do best- you keep going. Commodify the grief and spin it to something useful, spin it to something anti-CrockerCorp, something pro-freedom. Free speech, free lives, down with the goddamn alien menace. It kills, that you don’t even have the time (and how’s that one for irony?) to mourn the guy. You step up your game, though, churn out arts projects and miniseries (the mystery thicccens, as it always does, and if that’s a goddamns slam at the fucked up way Fieri, traitor that he is, is running the justice system? Then so be it, someone needs to fight back, somehow it ended up being you), set up theme parks and spew your pixelated shit everywhere as landmarks and codes and everything Lalonde thinks it can be used for, and a few things it can’t.

(You make them damn near indestructible, too, and if some part of you wants the kid to see them, to know what his bro did, that’s nobody else’s business).

(Sometimes you find yourself thinking about what it would have been like, if you’d been able to raise him. But you never let that go on for too long.)

Juggalos get elected for President, slurry factories pop up and stain the skyline of almost every major city as the rich and famous either roll over for her and spread their legs, or make like you and Rose and pony up. Drones whir through the sky and in the South, religious zeal surges- but not any good old Christianity like you’d think, no, that’s been done away with almost entirely; they worship the Mirthful Messiahs and their figurehead Presidents, like that was the goddamn breaking point where everyone went, yeah, well, we’re fucked anyway. And you keep going, what else is there left to do?

(There’s never enough time for anything, but somehow, between all that, you manage to convert one of your safe houses in Houston into what you think, maybe, could be called a home. It’s nearly the highest damn building in the city, old and tottering up on pylons that you get reinforced, and you stockpile it with food and movies and shitty pony books and some hideous fuckpuppets you found that make you shudder. You don’t know why you put those there, but you think that they belong).

Stiller and Wilson are murdered, too, publically, and you know the end is coming. The last stand, fucking dramatic as that may sound.

(The safe house is as prepped as it’ll ever be. You’ve left food, that second unbreakable katana, copies of your movies. A photo album, documenting what Earth was like and what it became; maybe you’ll get a kick of that. ~~You put in a picture of yourself, right in the very back. Shades off, a wry half-smile twisting your mouth.~~ Parts and schematics, for anything necessary he might have to build, and some extras, too. A robot appears on your doorstep in pieces, one day, out of bugfuck nowhere, but there’s achingly familiar handwriting scrawled on a card inside when you open it up, and you know that this, too, is necessary. You assemble it, and the thing is built like a tank, sure to last, sure to survive even when you won’t. You name it Sawtooth and put it in the apartment to wait and accumulate dust, and apparently it’ll activate in the 400 years, so that’s your job done. You hate it, a little, that it’ll be there for this kid when you can’t. But, well. You’re not sure you’d be that great of a parent, anyway.)

Lalonde doesn’t need to call you to tell you anything. Rebels are being hunted down left and right, and the choice is now between fucking hiding and waiting (for what? For them to kill you, for a kid you know you’ll never meet?) to be slaughtered in your sleep, and standing up. Making a goddamn statement, even if it might be the last thing you ever do.

That thought sits sour in your mouth, but you chase it down with a drink and a smoke and just savor the burn. You know it’s your last night, last everything, but damn, if you won’t go down without a fight.

(Rose doesn’t ask you if you want to come to New York, spend the night with her like you did all those years ago. You don’t make an offer, either).

Instead, you spend the night in the apartment you’ve set up for the kid. You don’t sleep, you chain-smoke and you double-check every goddamn thing in there. You shove the puppets up and into the crawlspace so you don’t have to fucking look at them. You rearrange the weapons that you’d put in the fridge when you were drunk the last time you were here (who would even put weapons in a fridge, what the fuck? The kid could be bumbling around and then bam, impaled like fifty times. The thought makes you sick.)

You think about what he might be like, and memories from a life that isn’t yours bounce around your head. He’d be cool, of that you’re sure. Pointy shades, ha, you’ve already provided those (four pairs, in fact, just in case, but you think he’ll be careful. You hope he will). You try to imagine his voice, but all you see are pieces of paper tacked to random surfaces. You try to imagine his eyes, but they’re always veiled by black-tinted glass. You try—

There’s no point.

You think about the Game, instead. The one that you know he’s going to have to play, thanks to Lalonde. And you think about how dangerous she said it would be. You think that maybe you should have done something more, left notes or fighting manuals or something of _yourself_ here for him, but this isn’t for you, it’s for him. This isn’t your home, but it will be his. You hope it will, and you hate that all you can do is hope; there’s no way to ensure anything, and you know that there are infinite doomed timelines where he doesn’t come, where he doesn’t survive, where he dies instead of playing, or he plays and then he dies, and that makes you feel even sicker.

(Some part of you honestly thought that you could win. You’re starting to realize that maybe you can’t, that maybe this kid isn’t going to grow up in a world like you did.)

(He’ll also get to meet a different you, if he makes it there, and that makes you feel worse, somehow. You’ve got all of one person you trust left alive at this point, and you’ve never been one to love properly. It’s dangerous for everyone involved. You can’t possibly love a child you’ve never met.)

It’s 4:13.

Morning is going to come soon, and you know you can’t stay forever.

~~Would he even know who you are? You don’t want this kid to grow up without knowing about you. About who put all this here for him.~~

You spend fifteen minutes and thirty-four seconds trying to find some sort of recording device. You’re sure you left one here, Jesus fuck, how could you have not, where the shitting fuck is- ah. You’ve got it. For some reason, it was shoved into the dishwasher. Drunk Past You has never been your best friend, the sadistic fucker.

It’s a small dictophone, and you suppose that’ll have to do, won’t it?

You check that it’s recording, introduce yourself like he needs it. You want to pretend like this is one of a thousand interviews you’ve ever done, but there’s no camera, no audience. Just you, talking to someone who won’t be here until long after you’ve turned to dust. You’re sure there’s irony enough in there to put neatly into your museum, actually, but the thought just exhausts you.

You ramble too. There’s no other word for it, just chatting shit like you always do to avoid anything genuine, even if your voice might come close to cracking, a few times, when you tell the kid about the horse that may or may not have raised you (you were a baby, you remember jack shit, okay?), but you stabled on the Hopywoodo sign anyway. You try not to talk too much about what’s going to happen, what has happened already, but you manage to fill the silence with your bullshit for almost an hour.

Outside, the sky is getting lighter.

You try to imagine the world that the kid is going to live in, and fail.

Quiet, like you could deny even saying it, you tell him that you’re proud. You say the name you picked for him, all those years ago, when Rose first mentioned the entire kid thing. The name that had felt just about right with the thought of him, shitty cliché as it may be.

(It's all the truth that you can offer him, from here.)

The dawn’s here, red as night bleeds into morning, and you stand up after twelve embarrassing seconds of trying to figure out how the fuck to turn the thing off. After a moment’s thought, you stow it back in the dishwasher- maybe Drunk Past Dave had a reason for it, but it’d give the guy a kick, you’re sure.

You take one last look around the apartment, and then you’re off, legendary and shitty swords with you (always gotta carry a spare, dude), shittier jpeg rocketboard carrying you on over to DC where you are going to wreak some fucking unholy mayhem on those clowns. And after that? Well. You know what’s coming.

(The rest will be history.)

**Author's Note:**

> As always, my tumblr is @allpaintedincolors if you want to chat.


End file.
